Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

sciencehabit writes "Human males and females have a strong tendency to live together in monogamous pairs, albeit for highly varied periods of time and degrees of fidelity. Just how such behavior arose has been the topic of much debate among researchers. A new study comes to a startling conclusion: Among primates, including perhaps humans, monogamy evolved because it protected infants from being killed by rival males."

"In law enforcement circles, the term pedophile... a person who commits one or more sexually-based crimes that relate to legally underage victims. These crimes may include child sexual abuse, statutory rape, offenses involving child pornography..." - Wikipedia

AKA up to 20 years old in some instances. But like 100 years ago 12 yo was considered adult for women. The vast majority of paedophiles fall under only this definition, that is why I used it.

The human brain is highly adaptive, so social traits tend to "evolve" with little or no actual genetic basis for the behavior. That means that it doesn't have to be advantageous in order to exist (when you are talking about humans, at least).

If anything humans are polygamous. A third cheat and the reason the other two thirds don't is because of social, financial and other consequences or just aren't attractive enough to get someone to cheat with.

His point was that monogamy in humans has several strong non-genetic factors heavily favoring it. I can certainly imagine the non-genetic factors easily overriding whatever genetic predispositions we may have either way.

If polygamy carried no political, religious, social, financial, legal, health, etc. consequences or humans lacked the foresight/intelligence/education to consider them like animals do, it would likely be far more common - just look at how "loose" soldiers often got with women in conquered te

Women cheat just as much as men. Your argument still holds--it makes just as much sense for the female to cheat as it does the male, namely the opportunity to mix your genes with someone else's--you just need to excise some of the sexism.

It takes a female chimpanzee 4 to 5 years to teach her offspring enough to survive. During that time, she does not come into heat. Humans, on the other hand, can have babies about once a year. A single female could not raise them all on her own without some help. Today, we call that helper a husband and father. Monogamy means more babies.

It takes a female chimpanzee 4 to 5 years to teach her offspring enough to survive. During that time, she does not come into heat. Humans, on the other hand, can have babies about once a year. A single female could not raise them all on her own without some help. Today, we call that helper a husband and father. Monogamy means more babies.

I'm tired of so-called scientists making news stories out of un-testable speculations...

Out of interest, did you RTFA? Or, more importantly, did you read the original [pnas.org] papers [sciencemag.org] it cites? It's a fairly common scenario for scientists to do some real, rigorous testing of a hypothesis, and describe their work in a scientific paper, and then for a mainstream news article to print a dumbed-down version, and smart people reading that article to get the wrong idea of the original work.

In short: before you bash the scientists involved, read what they wrote, rather than what someone else wrote about them

So to say that something evolved to prevent something? I could see trying to argue that it was, at least, a side-effect, perhaps even a primary effect, but to give a purely natural process an intent of *prevention*...

You're the only one assigning intent. Evolution doesn't act with intent, it acts with cause. Infanticide arbitrarily eliminates potentially useful genes and once you've evolved a society that provides new and interesting ways to lose your life that have nothing to do with your fitness as an organism it loses its usefulness.

The headline of horribly stupid because it identifies and ascribes intention and foresight to a process where those qualities are by definition absent. It's the village idiot's view of evolution and is as useful as thinking that the sun decides to rise each morning in order to warm the earth.

Monogamy didn't evolve to do X or Y or to prevent Z. It's one of many traits that allowed its carriers' offspring to endure.

Being a father of 4, I love those whipper snappers like crazy, even when being annoying, noisy, crying, mean.
Other people's kids? Little turds can go the hell if they act like that. Shut them up and get the them the F outta my face.
Of course I never say that to anyone and have the higher level thinking to take a step back and get some sympathy. But the initial instinct is there, hating other peoples' childrens' antics. Perhaps a latent instinct still at play.

They did a statistic among many primate species. But the conclusion that this applies to humans is propably wrong:

The closest relatives of humans - chimps and bonobos - don't live in monogamous pairs.Humans share genital features and gender relative body size with bonobos and chimps but not with monogamous primates like gibbons.And pure hunter gatherer societies that exist know don't live monogamous.

It is very likely that monogamy in humans was triggered by agriculture. It really doesn't make much sense for a population living in small communal groups without property.http://www.sexatdawn.com/ [sexatdawn.com]

The research presented in the article might be sound for monogamous primates, but that group of animals does not include humans.

Long ago, I was at a good friend's house waiting for him when his wife asked me to help her with some small task that her husband normally would have done. So I did the work, and when I was done she thanked me, saying "The only thing better than having one husband is having two husbands!"

I immediately replied, "The only thing worse than having one wife is having two wives."

How does monogamy change who is in competition with whom? There is no evolutionary mechanism to enforce monogamy. From a purely genetic standpoint there is no benefit to monogamy for a strong male.

Articles like this are just freeze dried beef pasta boiled up in 100 gallon vats and thrown to the neckbeards who gobble it up while slathering vaseline and yanking each other off.

Shit isn't even pretending to be science any more. It's just some asshole in a lab coat leading a revivial in a Kentucky tent.

The argument is that your statement about a strong male being better off without monogamy seems right but isn't, because if strong males fail to stick around and ensure the children they conceived survive to reach adulthood and carry on the cycle, it won't happen, and their "strong" genes will be wiped from the face of the earth.

Tip: humans are social animals. The survival of the species and close group is just as important for the strong male to spread his genes as his own survival is. Your knowledge on the subject seems cursory at best, though I suspect that you are trolling.

This is how it works in nature - sometimes. The strongest male being the only one that reproduces is not at all the most common reproductive strategy. Even when it does occur, sometimes there are smaller males waiting for the top two to go off and fight so that they have a shot at the females (sea lions).

With birds it makes sense for the male to stick around until the offspring leave the nest. But they still quite often will stick around the next season as well. There's no simplistic evolutionary reason

What a myopic view. You have a lot to learn about evolution, and even more so about dogma and religion. "Science" an esteemed science journal would unlikely stoop to sensationalize. Where do you get your bias -- FOX?

Science works by creating theories (either from educated guesses or observations, often both) and testing them.

If it can't be tested, it's not science*.

Sorry to seem pedantic, but science works by creating hypothesis and testing them, not theories.

Theories need to be supported by a vast body of evidence, and should provide both an explanation and the ability to make falsifiable predictions. They start out as hypothesis, however once experimentation and observation bear out the hypothesis, and sufficient data is accrued to show that all the expected data fits the hypothesis, and that predictions made by the hypothesis continue to be valid, then the framewo

Trust me when I tell you that there is more Rah, rah, Go Team! than scientific method in origins science. I mean, they just voted to see whether to accept that dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid 65 million years ago. We don't need evidence! We have politics!

and killing offspring is directly opposed to the core of evolutionary theory, which rewards the widest possible range of mates to guarantee diverse genetic combinations and the maximum chances for survival and spread of strong genes.

This may come as a complete surprise to you, but there do exist plenty of creatures out there that do kill the offspring and still haven't become extinct and there do exist plenty of creatures out there that do not kill their offspring and only mate with one or very few partners and still haven't managed to become extinct. Hell, there exists atleast one specific one that doesn't mate at all and produces only perfect clones of themselves, and still haven't become extinct. The point is, you cannot just lump different survival-strategies together like that and deny the existence or even the possibility for anything other than your one chosen one; what works for one type of a creature may not work for another, and the nature has the tendency of throwing all sorts of types of stuff on the wall and seeing what sticks.

Oh, anonymous person on the Internet is such a big tough man. Catch a whiff of that musky manliness. But only a whiff! For should you inhale too deeply, the raw might of their being may overwhelm your soul!

Listen, everyone! You should accept how this person chooses to address YOU. The Cat has obviously shown his superior intellect and grasp of reality. Do not let the display of raw emotion intimidate you. Instead, be in awe of such power unleashed.

Humans are not brought into heat by the absence of young, and killing offspring is directly opposed to the core of evolutionary theory, which rewards the widest possible range of mates to guarantee diverse genetic combinations and the maximum chances for survival and spread of strong genes.

Male squirrels will gnaw the nuts off their male offspring if the mother neglects to defend them constantly. Last I checked squirrels seemed to be enjoying reasonable reproductive success;-)

You may want to read about nursing and the absence of ovulation. You also should follow that up with how long nursing goes on in hunter-gatherer societies.

Not to mention that nursing is a heavy calorie drain. Even if ovulation does occur when a mother is nursing, nursing a year old child is a heavy calorie drain - calories that can contribute to a new male's child instead. There's also the time element - killing another male's child increases the

Well reading TFA criticism was given that human monogamy is primarily socially imposed, and that we are not monogamous on the whole. On the other hand, we can think of some reasons why that might be, the strongest one comes to mind that practicing infanticide amongst humans tends to result in you being removed from the gene donor pool. Perhaps we need monogamy least because we have another mechanism to protect our young? Speculation, of course, they didn't study this.

Clearly you didn't read the article. The very study linked in the summary specifically compared 230 primate species, some of which are socially monogamous and some of which are not. And it explains why it *hasn't* evolved among all of the fairly similar species in the study using a model based on the infanticide rate.

There are almost certainly things to be picked apart in the study, but you need to understand the basic premise before you can start on that track.

Human males and females have a strong tendency to live together in monogamous pairs

That is complete nonsense. We are seeing the results of social pressure to be monogamous; it is not genetic.Just look at history for 1000's of examples to the contrary. Monogamy is a very recent phenomenon.

These studies are a huge disservice to humanity that attempt to "force" a point of view on people.

It's also reasonable to assume that infanticide may have more attribution to infant mortality than deliber

We are seeing the results of social pressure to be monogamous; it is not genetic.

In a social species, culture (or peer pressure if you want to call it that) is a selectable trait which can influence the evolution of a species. The trait is a passed on through learned behaviour rather than genetics

Modifications in behaviour of members of a group can directly affect the survivability of the entire group relative to other groups of the same species.

We are seeing the results of social pressure to be monogamous; it is not genetic

If you think this means that it's not evolved behaviour, then I can only assume that your education in evolution stopped just after Darwin. Try picking up a textbook written in the last 30 years. I'd recommend The Extended Phenotype (published in 1982).

Because there's no "design" to evolution. Whatever works, works. And there's not one "right" way to evolve. There's no reason for a feature that evolves in one species to independently evolve in other species (although it's possible.)

That is not an answer at all. (And who brought "design" into the discussion? Creationism wouldn't explain it either; why did God grant wings to birds and not to us?)

The study (and the linked article) go far beyond "lots of stuff could have worked and this is the one that must have come up." What is says is that monogamy hasn't evolved in other species because they don't practice infanticide. And why is that? Because big-brained animals take a long time to develop, so the young are defenseless.

It goes somewhat beyond correlation, in that infanticide consistently precedes monogamy, and when infanticide does not arise neither does monogamy, or so they claim. It's not an airtight argument, nor does it seem very amenable to a controlled experiment to test it.

But the point is, it's not productive to discuss what "could be" explained by evolution, since that is practically everything and anything. You have to stick with the fossil record, DNA, and (where possible) direct experiments.

No, it did not say that other species practiced infanticide. It said that infanticide was much more detrimental to us (and what had evolved into us) due to the extended period of helplessness during infancy. Infanticide was much too expensive for us than it is for lions and such.

It's worth noting that one of the reasons for severe decline of lions has been slowness evolutional response to human hunting factor (they seek mainly alpha males). Essentially every time one dies, the entire pride suffers a bout of infanticide, which is the key reason for decline of lions in the areas where they are hunted. If it was just alpha male deaths caused directly by humans, lions as species would have far less problems.

It's a pretty good microcosm of small tribal community and is somewhat relevant to humans as well.

What is says is that monogamy hasn't evolved in other species because they don't practice infanticide.

What I was thinking when I posted was of all the nature documentaries where a male adopts a new female into his "harem" and promptly kills her young. A few weeks ago I saw a somewhat unnerving film of a zebra doing that, picking up the foal by the neck with his teeth, and bashing him down onto the ground. I believe lots of other species do it too, and I've seen films of several.

There is no general answer to whether you will get more bang for the buck from defense (sticking around to guard your young) or offense (going out to eliminate the competition). It depends entirely on the situation. There is simply no utility in trying to reason out an answer based on basic evolutionary principles. Many narratives are plausible. The point of gathering evidence is to see which one actually occurred.

Not only that, but it's not possible for monogamy to be the result of infanticide (and through extrapolation, "evolved to prevent it"). If anything, it's the opposite: the survivors of infanticide benefited from it, and whatever genes passed down from their father which caused them to commit infanticide would be passed on to them, continuing the trend.

I would suspect that monogamy evolved out of necessity and lack of population density, possibly during a period of strong environmental stressors, when female

Not really. In a species with a relatively long gestation period and few offspring per litter, the limiting factor in population growth is the females. A primate female can only produce a very limited number of children over her lifespan (especially compared, for example, to rodents) and a significant fraction of those won't survive to adulthood anyway. A reproductive strategy that involves killing even more of them off is going to leave the tribe very weak and so the survivors may have benefitted from the process, but that only matters in evolutionary terms if they survive long enough to breed, and do so in comparable quantities to others with different strategies.

So you are saying evolution is like throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks? Sounds to me like some entity could have is noodily appendages guiding the whole thing.
Perhaps I'm just hungry. Pasta sounds good tonight.

Can you explain why you *didn't* get into a car accident in the last month? What was it that you did that nobody else who got into a car accident last month did, to cause you to avoid all the accidents that could have happened?

You could say that Bill was drunk, or Alice was texting, and that's why they got into car accidents, but that doesn't explain how every single person that drove drunk or texted while driving didn't get into an accident.

What kind of explanation were you expecting?

Birds clearly have an advantage by being able to fly. If I said "Flying is not advantageous, because if it was, all organisms would have evolved to be able to fly", would that be convincing to you?

Can you explain why you *didn't* get into a car accident in the last month?

While I haven't been accident free, I do tend to drive more cautiously and I know of many drivers that aren't nearly so cautious. I've been a passenger in their vehicles, and sadly I've been around long enough to know of a great many people personally who have died due to idiotic things they've done (like being 8x the legal intoxication limit and driving off a bridge for somebody I knew).

Their genes have been pulled from the gene pool, although it could be said that automobiles haven't been driven by human

You could say that Bill was drunk, or Alice was texting, and that's why they got into car accidents, but that doesn't explain how every single person that drove drunk or texted while driving didn't get into an accident.

If you got in a car accident, would anyone swear that this must be a murder because, you were cautious driver? Or would they just accept that being cautious only decreases your odds of being in an accident to some still greater than 0 probability?

Imagine if you were a non-drug user and a virgin. If a doctor informed you that you tested positive for HIV, it might take a bit more evidence in the form of more tests to convince you. It's not impossible to contract HIV in oth

My original post was to "Black Parrot" who said "But that doesn't explain why it hasn't evolved in lots of other species."

I was illustrating with my car accident analogy that you don;t need to explain why things *don't* happen with that kind of specificity.

The "But that doesn't explain why [monogamy] hasn't evolved in lots of other species." argument is analogous to the "But that doesn't explain why other safe drivers still get into car accidents" argument.

We'll never evolve to be better drivers, cars are too safe for that (little relationship between poor driving skill and being kicked from the gene pool) and good drivers can be killed due to others' stupidity.

We would quickly evolve into better drivers, if the licensing laws were changed.

First, let's assume that good driving is enhanced by certain genetic characteristics - quick reaction times, fine motor control, good peripheral vision, etc. We don't have to identify them, just assume they exist.

We already know that our culture highly values cars. People who own more expensive vehicles are generally viewed as more successful, and therefore are more desirable as mates. This is no different than birds who attr

I would say a good reason to doubt someone had been in a car accident, would be if you had reason to believe that they were never in contact with cars. For example: I would highly doubt the claim that anyone dying prior to the invention of the automobile could have died as a result of a car accident.

Why didn't Benjamin Franklin get into a car accident? "It would have been impossible since cars weren't invented until after his death." seems a perfectly legitimate reason.

Young women are attracted to young men who take unnecessary risks in extreme displays of their adult skills. Today it's smoking the wheels of cars, not so long ago it was jumping out of trees onto wild buffalo. Every hero in every action movie does the same thing, no matter what is thrown at the hero he gets up and keeps going, no matter what the hero blows up or how many bullets he shoots no innocent bystander is ever hurt.

Young women are not attracted to 'idiots' that crash and burn, they are attracted to 'heros' who's skills and strength keep them alive and healthy despite the odds. It's not a conscious thing in either sex, "cheating death" is an integral part of the human ritual of finding a suitable mate, it's so deeply ingrained in humans that a males brain chemistry will reward "cheating death" with feelings of elation, pride, and self-satisfaction.

Looking back as an old man who had the luck to survive the motorbike ritual (among others), young men really do behave like peacocks, the things they unconsciously do to attract a mate are even more dangerous to the individual than that ridiculous tail is to the peacock. At the end of the day it does make our societies (if not our species) better suited to the civilizations we invented. We are continually evolving and are in a feedback loop with the environment we have created for ourselves, not unlike the termite and it's air-conditioned fungus farm.

IANAA (I am not an Anthropologist) but I'm going to take a stab in the dark and hypothesise that it is because human offspring require a much bigger commitment of time, energy and resources before they can fend for themselves, than the offspring of pretty much any other species on the planet. Mind you monogamy is not exactly some sort of genetic trait we have evolved. Here in the west it is largely a cultural phenomenon that the christian church has popularised. There are plenty of cultures around the world where even fairly low status males can have more than one wife and there are also cultures where wives can have multiple husbands. So it is probably more accurate to say that humans evolved to be highly social and to engage in highly structured very long term bonding to form monogamous or polygamous families, partly to minimise infanticide and to maximise the odds of their very time and resource expensive offspring reaching adulthood.

I'd like to hypothesize that a lot of people are hung up on finding an evolutionary answer for everything. Sometimes things just happen in a species without there being an evolutionary advantage. Species are not hyper optimized. Sometimes things are just side effects. Sometimes I get a feeling that people like to anthropomorphize evolution, replacing a deity that designs with specific reasons and goals with a system that does the same thing. Especially with very fuzzy things like behavior.

Ie, I've heard people discussing the reason for grandmothers. This is a silly concept, unless your view of evolution is that it is a system that optimizes organisms. Maybe grandmothers exist because humans live longer than they used to, no need for a hand waving explanation. Others want to have an evolutionary "reason" for homosexuality. Yes, it's not a nice thought to think that it's a biological mistake, but it's certainly easy enough to think that it is because some genes are expressed at a certain time that caused various hormones to be produced at a particular time in development, and as a side effect of this slight variance in timing you end up with an organism that does not fit the standardized phenotype. May as well ask what the evolutionary advantage of preferring red heads over blondes is.

Humans are extremely complex, in a chaos system way. We have plenty of attributes that are not optimal for reproduction of the species, but they exist because they don't kill us off. But evolution is dumbed down for teaching purposes, even in undergraduate classes. People still recite "survival of the fittest" as if it's some sort of law. Others talk about "higher" species or "more evolved", which is nonsense.

As for monogomy, research among cultures around the world do show a consistent view that is "mostly" monogamous. Ie, serial monogamy with occasional cheating on the sly. That's universal. Yes, there are examples of cultures with polygamy, but even in those societies the polygamy is rare and when it occurs it is due to societal pressures (ie, a severe shortage of one gender, usually men due to wars), and at other times is restricted to just high class members of society (ie, to have more than one wife is proof that you are wealthy).

Indeed.Imagine you are living in a small group of foragers that share all their food and take care of the children together and have next to no property. How exactly could mating with only one partner help you raise your child or sustain food supply? It is also hard to imagine how infanticide could be prevented by monogamy in such a context. A better strategy for a female to avoid infanticide would be to regularly mate with most males so that all males might be the father of each child. And actualy that is

Yeah, yeah, misogyny is the buzz-word of the day... which really means "if you challenge anything that could be construed to challenge a woman in any way for any reason, I'll pull out the misogyny card so that I don't need an argument". The term is about as robust as "discrimination" (which means "to choose"). The power of words...

Anyway, a friend of mine taught in Papua New Guinea for about 10 years back in the 80s. He lived there for that time (other than the occasional holiday). He was not a missionary - he was there for education programs. This is roughly what he told me a few years back (and re-confirmed when I asked him again)...

The men tended to stay with the men, the women tended to stay with the women. There was only a loose "sexual" association between men and women - and the offspring (when the men got randy) belonged to the community rather than a couple. The kids would go with whatever adult they wanted to stay with, sometimes months at a time. Over time, this social structure was forcibly changed by the missionaries to reform these hethens.

Now, this social structure was not monogamous in ANY sense of the word and involved little or no infanticide. Interestingly, it mimics (loosely) some aspects of Indonesian culture, although Indonesian culture has also been "westernised" to a degree, although I did see this sense of "community" that you don't get in the west... front doors left open, people just coming and going into other's houses, kids staying at other families' house for weeks at a time - it was amazing to see.

That's the drawback of the mod system, sometimes it reinforces a cultural/sexual/religious/political bias to someones personal agenda, rather than modding the content.

Personally I think monogamy happened because, after the sex, now you have to see to the needs of two or more screaming,weepy, hormonal women who want to eat, have new clothes, go to the river/fire/gathering NOW! Right damn NOW! Early man could even see the need to filter this down to one at a time in spite of sex.Then Cheating was born, which later spawned lawyers, so even a good fix still has an unavoidable drawback.

im a hardcore atheist who is definitely pro choice and have absolutely no part in any cults, and if i had mod points, i would have modded you down as well. it is obvious that you are being a flamebait, either that or your parents should have washed your mouth out with soap when you were younger.